Vital Signs – Edward Ragg
ISBN: 9781788641524
£9.99
Edward Ragg won the 2012 Cinnamon Press Poetry Award and his debut collection was A Force That Takes (2013). His second volume, Holding Unfailing (2017), charted the rise of modern China, followed by the more experimental and multiply voiced Exploring Rights (2020) and And Then the Rain Came (2022), an exposition on love and well-being forged under the global pandemic and climate crisis.
Vital Signs draws on the inspiration of the medical vital signs in three parts – ‘Body’, ‘Pulse’ and ‘Breath’ – each with nine poems that explore romantic love, death and the experiences of grief and loss in a poetry that is as embodied, pulsing with life and rhythmically breathing.
Edward Ragg’s Vital Signs is a book of mourning, devotion, and creaturely alertness (‘Word turned flesh like a foot in dirt’). In delicate, precise rhythms, these poems vivify our sense of the body’s pulses, the beating of the heart, the vibrations of the breath. Ragg offers poetry as ‘the body’s other dance’. Conjuring Celan’s ‘worldbeat’, the poet evokes Beijing snows and Durham skies, a visitation from a bat, the stamping of a bull’s foot. These are tender, capacious poems of vigil and remembrance and rededication: elegizing the poet’s father; addressing the beloved; limning a northern English landscape of disused mines and small villages; dreaming of ‘Venice in a Beijing light’; moving among languages and inheritances. Ragg is a poet of economy, freshness, and subtle musicality. His work is open to traveler’s tales and contemporary sculpture and manifests a complex historical consciousness; it bespeaks both a homing instinct and a cosmopolitan scope. We encounter a poet sounding out his vocation, ‘listening to whole/bodies of poems echoing across/land and sea’. In Vital Signs, Ragg takes up the oldest tasks of the poet: to listen, to commemorate, to sing. ‘Conscious the world’s breath / will one day scatter us,’ this poet registers ‘the end of being echoing’.
Maureen N. McLane
With a deft yet emphatic touch, and by probing the things of life at a molecular level, the poems in Vital Signs continue to seek answers to the unanswerable, to the mysteries which surround and inhabit us. Here, in the conscious company of poet and poem, Edward Ragg explores the palette of the human condition, both at home in the familiar landscapes of family and away at the more foreign destinations and starting points of adulthood, until a kind of alchemy occurs that enables us – in body, pulse and breath – to savour what really matters, and to understand the intricacies of language, love and legacy. Ragg speaks of ‘The gamble we take every time / we try to say what we think’. In Vital Signs this gamble pays off as ‘certainly as the incoming tide’.
Claire Dyer
Listen to ‘Circular Breathing’
Author biography
Edward Ragg was born in Stockton-on-Tees in 1976 and since 2007 has lived in Beijing. He was a joint-winner of the 2012 Cinnamon Press Poetry Award and A Force That Takes was his first collection, followed by Holding Unfailing. Exploring Rights and And Then the Rain Came. His poems have appeared in numerous international magazines and anthologies, including the 2014 Forward Book of Poetry (Faber & Faber, 2013), Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam (Eyewear Publishing/Cinnamon Press, 2012), Jericho & Other Stories & Poems (Cinnamon Press, 2012) and New Poetries IV (Carcanet, 2007). He is also the author of a number of critical works and articles on wine. Edward is the co-founder of Dragon Phoenix Wine Consulting.